


Places we don't know

by evil bunny wolf (evil_bunny_king)



Category: Daredevil (TV), Marvel TV Universe, The Punisher (TV 2017)
Genre: A different kind of after, AU, F/M, Horror, Hurt/Comfort, Post-Punisher, creature feature
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-11-30
Updated: 2017-12-08
Packaged: 2019-02-08 13:48:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,634
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12865818
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/evil_bunny_king/pseuds/evil%20bunny%20wolf
Summary: “What’s going on, Frank?” she tries.And he tells her.He tells her about a young girl barricaded in a single room flat. The bodies leading up to it, pieces missing, chewed away; twitching back to life as Frank wrestled the kid to the floor.“It’s something new,” he says, his eyes on hers. “But I’ve seen things like it.”





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Ejunkiet](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ejunkiet/gifts).



Karen finds him with a knife in his hand and the edge pressed against his jugular.

“Frank-” she says almost before she can register it, the breath leaving her like a punch to the chest. The pain of it knots sharp and sudden in her chest. He doesn’t look up. He doesn’t move, as she remains those two steps into his foxhole of an apartment, the key that he’d given her clenched in her suddenly tight grip.

She looks at the way he is studiously not looking at her, the way he’s sat himself back, back pressed to the wall, and then she makes her way through the boxes and cheap furniture, the filling  bookshelves. She stops just over an arm’s length away - enough to give him space, but only just.

“Frank,” she tries, after a moment. She’s not quite sure she likes what her voice sounds like; she can feel it waver, the fragility of the line of her mouth. There will be time for that later, though. She needs- she needs to know what’s pushed him to the edge he’s standing on. “Frank, what’s going on?”

He holds himself still another minute, staring at a point in the wall behind her.

“What are you doing here?”

He says it in the inflectionless tone she can never quite recognise, the one that reminds her of the wet crunch of breaking bones - of gunshots in too-tight spaces, the moments that she’d almost forgotten, or wanted to forget, in the brief months of _after._

“I could ask the same of you.” She keeps her movements small, predictable, as she slides the key in her pocket and watches his hands. “You were in New Jersey.”

 _Bird watching,_ he’d told her, with that drag of a smile and she hadn’t believed him, of course she hadn’t, but she’d smiled back and let it go anyway.

“And you thought, what, you’d just let yourself in?”

She doesn’t miss a beat. “It’s why you gave me the key.”

Frank laughs and the blade nicks his skin at the movement of his throat, a bead of red trailing down his neck. “Yeah,” he says, buoyed by black humour. “It is. And this-” he gestures with the hand not holding the knife, the movement no more than a flutter of his fingers. “It’s not what you think. That - suicide - that’s not the ledge I’m currently peering over.”

He licks his lips and finally meets her gaze, his eyes flickering towards hers and back. “Wouldn’t be considering this if I had a choice, Karen. The fact I haven’t done it yet says there might be.”

She nods, as if that makes sense. “Okay,” she says. “Okay. Then - what is this, Frank?”

“This,” he says, calmly and simply, “is the fucking impossible.” 

He nods to an upended selection of files rolled across his usually neat table. “Have a look.”

Three steps and she has the documents in her hands, flicking through the pages. Newspaper reports – her own, to start (a missing person’s with no useable leads) and then a collection of others from across the state with Frank’s scrawl over them, connecting dots, asking questions. The dates jump from half a year ago to a couple weeks ago, to renewed activity, a drug bust gone wrong. She’s reading them, but she doesn’t see – she frowns-

“Final pages,” he says, before she can ask; she glances back and thank god, he’s drawn the knife away. He watches her out of the corner of his eye, though, and keeps it close. “Didn’t believe it at first, either. But then I got this.” 

He reaches with the hand that holds the knife and peels back a bandage across his wrist she hadn’t quite noticed before, and she jolts at the sight of – a bite mark, something savager torn into the flesh of his forearm. She takes a step towards him but he waves her away, nodding towards the files. She suddenly, irrationally, wants to hit him. “ _Read them._ ”

So she does, leant against the edge of his table, the hard edge digging into her hip.

She’s not sure if she quite believes it.

The files describe animal attacks and drug-fuelled rampages. Creatures on all fours that move faster than they should and victim accounts that swear that what attacked them was both human and yet couldn’t be; victims who died from a fever that couldn’t be recognised. And it doesn’t surprise her that he’d have followed this, that he would’ve followed it so _far_ and at some point she knows she should be angry, but instead she looks up at Frank, perched on the edge of his cot: the wound on his arm and the rasp of his thumb on the knife’s edge.

“I don’t understand,” is what she manages, and Frank nods, as if that – denial, disbelief – is perfectly reasonable. Which of course it is.

“Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, I thought it was a, uh, new drug. Something potent, stupid. Like that zombie drug a few years back.”

“But you don’t think that now?”

“No.” 

“Then what is it?”

He does look at her then, his fingers toying with the knife.

Her laugh catches in her throat. “Really, Frank?”

“You didn’t see it,” he says, expression unchanging. “Her. You didn’t see the others.”

She takes the final steps towards him, then, her arms crossed sharply across her chest and the files pressed against her shoulder. “Frank. You can’t honestly believe in this  _bullshit.”_

She’s getting angry now. It takes her a second to recognise that, but the tightness she’d felt before is loosening into something hot, something furious - she’s been prepared for this, in a way; she’s figured that his story had only one ending and to be honest, hers probably only had one as well. But it wasn’t like this. “Frank-.”

“You wanna take that risk?” He thumbs the knife edge, an adaptation of his usual trigger finger tic. “Would you do it, in my position?”

She drags a hand through her hair. “I guess,” she starts, and she feels so angry her eyes burn, “I guess I didn’t see you being afraid of fucking dying.”

She sees his fingers clench, hands balling into fists. Good, she thinks. _Get_ angry.

“They don’t. Fucking. Die,” he spits out, gesturing to the papers, sharp and controlled and alive, but there’s something else there too, she realises. Something more akin to fear.  “They don’t  _die_ , Karen, and I, I don’t know want to know what I’d be capable of. Not like that. Not over that edge. Do you understand? I can’t-”

He’s afraid of losing control, she realises. Of tipping over that fine line he’s toed, between man and monster.

She’s still holding the files. She feels them, she feels their weight, dead and crisp against her collarbone and she lowers them back onto the table. She makes herself take a steadying breath.

“What’s going on, Frank?” she tries.

And he tells her.

He tells her about a young girl barricaded in a single room flat. The bodies leading up to it, pieces missing, chewed away; twitching back to life as Frank wrestled the kid to the floor.

“It’s something new,” he says, his eyes on hers. “But I’ve seen things like it.”

The way he says it says there’s only one solution. She’s not quite as ready to accept that.

“Okay,” she says, nodding and thinking, still thinking. “Okay.” Another breath in and out. “So, what? That’s it?”

He looks at her, steadily, and she runs a hand through her hair and pulls until she feels the burn at her roots. “That’s it? You give up?”

His expression darkens, but he doesn’t move. She leans forward and reaches for the knife in his grip, and he lets her. She feels the tension in his fingers.

“Like I said,” he says, with managed calm. “That’s the choice.”

“Bullshit. You don’t know what’s going to happen, yet.”

“No options,” he repeats, through his tightened jaw, and she feels his fingers shift around the knife. She tightens her grip in return.

“Bullshit."

He looks at her. He looks at her and her hand on the knife and the way he does it makes it occur to her that- maybe- he’s been considering this option since she entered. He’d been waiting for her to come to this conclusion; he wouldn’t ask her himself, and this is exactly the kind of shit that he’s pulled on her before but they would discuss this -  _after._

“Think you could do it?”

The question is quiet, soft. It catches her off guard, displacing her anger with something colder and infinitely worse and she pushes out her answer on a breath. "Yes."

He looks at his hands. "Know you don't believe me. Trust me, yeah, I know this is crazy. But I need to know that you'll do it, if it comes to that."

She waits a beat, and then she takes the knife. He lets her.

The hilt’s warm to touch. She weighs it in her hand, and wonders how long he’s been sat there, weighing his options.

“Okay then,” he says, and then he raises her grip to his neck.

She feels the give of his skin; the hum as he speaks against the blade.

“Cut here when I tell you. Keep it long, vertical. It’ll stop me faster. Or if that fails, try and saw across the throat.”

He follows the instructions with gestures. She follows, keeping her grip as steady as possible, aware of his eyes on her. It feels unreal. 

“And if that fails too,” he continues, releasing her hand. “You have your gun on you?”

She gives him a look and he laughs properly for the first time that night. “Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, so, if the knife doesn’t seem to work, or I move too much, use it. Put me down. Okay? Don’t think twice.”

“Okay,” she says, and it's then that he finally sinks back, leaving her with the warm knife in her hand.

“Why a knife?” she asks as he settles into the cot. She digs her .380 out of her purse, resting it across her knees. He doesn’t fully relax until she’s checked the magazine and flicked the safety off. She focuses on her question: “Why not a gun to start?”

“It, uh, distracts them,” he says, eventually. He looks tired, she sees more clearly now - his eyelids low, as if they’re heavy, shadows smeared around his eyes. He’s still going out of stubbornness and sheer spite. “The blood,” he clarifies. “A bullet they can walk through, but blood? The messier, the better.”

“Right,” she says and the word rings hollow even to her own ears. “Of course.”

 

-

 

It’s only now that she’s so close, knees tucked to chin on the cot beside him, that she sees how sick he looks. He’s shaking, visibly so – he periodically squeezes the tremors out of his hands, seizing them around the single shitty blanket he’s draped over the cot. He’s controlled even when he’s bat-shit delirious.

She levers herself up to fill a chipped mug with water from the industrial sink in the corner, ignoring his mumbled complaint when she takes the knife with her (gun back in its holster, safety switched back on).

“Have you taken anything?” she asks, pushing the mug against his arm until he reaches for it. He takes it, sloshing water onto the bed, drains it, then pushes it onto the desk. She fills it up again. “For your- infection, illness, whatever this is?”

“Advil. Course of antibiotics.” A shrug. “It’s set in fast, though.” She can see the sweat beaded on his brow, the dampness of his skin. But she’s not a doctor - hell, she doesn’t  _know_ a doctor who’d agree to see him.

“Antibiotics?” she says, because that’s a good sign. He shrugs a lopsided shrug.

“Got a contact. Good for meds in emergencies. Figured it wouldn’t work, though.”

“Right,” she says. “Because it’s, something else, right?”

He rolls his eyes towards her, frowning. “You didn’t see it,” he starts, fluttering his fingers as the echo of the gesture he would've made. “If you’d see-”

He cuts off with a sudden, violent jerk. His back spasms, and he gags, hands raising to wrap around his mouth and shit, shit, he needs-

His hand flails out, reaching for – a bucket, this basin kind of thing she hadn’t noticed before and she pushes it into his grip, staying close as he vomits back up the water she’d given him. He remains like that a while, first dry heaving and then just panting, shaky and too-fast. When he seems stable she reaches out and pries the bucket from his limp hands.

“Shit,” she says, succinctly. “Shit, Frank.”

His shoulders jerk with a movement that might’ve been a shrug of agreement or just an aftershock. She passes him the mug of water again. He sips it, this time.

This has gone on long enough. “Frank,” she starts. “Frank, you need to go to a-”

“No hospitals,” he rasps, predictably, but he still hasn’t straightened – he remains hunched like that, hands curled in his lap and shaking. His voice at least is steady. “No good, anyway. Think it’s viral. Blood carried, though. Fits with the bite.”

Her gaze flicks from the bucket, to the peeled back bandage – it doesn’t  _look_ infected, but what does she know? – and back. Her voice edges in something she doesn’t quite want to label as hysteria. Frustration certainly. “So you want me to do, what? Watch you suffer for hours on end out of sheer stubbornness?”

He fixes her with a steady, hard look, one that says  _didn’t ask you to be here, that’s a decision you’ve taken on yourself_ and she crouches down to meet it, ignoring the smell of the vomit.

“Situation’s changed, Frank.”

“No hospitals.”

“Your contact, then? Someone?”

He rasps out a breath. “Tell you what. Give me, uh, give me until dawn. If the shit doesn’t hit the fan, if I’m wrong, then I’ve got a number you can call. But.” He reaches for the knife, discarded in the sheets, and wraps her fingers around the hilt again. “You gotta wait. And you gotta be ready.”

It’s a shit compromise. And she’s certain she’s not going to keep it – if he gets worse, she’ll call someone; he’s got to have contacts of his own, someone who’d sewn some of those fresh scars.

Frank’s expression says he’s guessed that, but he waits for her answer anyway.

She pauses a moment, and then lets him give her the knife again.

“Good,” he says, his hands retreating to his lap. They’re clammy; he wipes them on his jeans, distracted. He’s looking at the wall again and she’s not sure what he sees. “The gun.”

She loosens the holster, makes sure it’s in easy reach but nothing more, and he accepts that, levering himself back on the bed until he can lean against the wall. 

She sits herself back on the stool, knife in her lap, and prepares herself to wait.

 

-

 

They sit up until late, scrunched up on his cot, the knife lying between them.

They don’t speak much. They sit and she flicks through the files from her latest case, the one she’d broken into his flat for, and after a few minutes of pointed stares she passes half of them to Frank and they pore over them together. Occasionally they hear the rumble of the metro rumbling below. Occasionally one of them stirs, turns a page, and the heavy air resettles between them.

He gets no worse, but also no better.

By three her eyes feel dull and heavy.

After the words start to blur she stirs, setting the files aside, and thinks about dragging herself up for another refill of coffee. Frank is tucked in the blanket, his eyes heavy-lidded and bloodshot. He hardly stirs as she stretches, rolling her feet out until they click.

She settles back against the wall and decides to give it another minute. 

Another train rumbles by. Frank flips a page and it’s like he’s moving in slow motion, movement sluggish in the heat.

 

-

 

She wakes up from a dream about her grandparents’ log cabin and the sticky-sweet smell of sweating pine to Frank calling out in his sleep.

Or at least she thinks he’s asleep until she tries puts a hand on his brow and he jerks away, eyes wide and wild and looking at her without recognition.

The fear from earlier drops back through her stomach like a stone.

“Frank-”

He twitches at the name but still looks straight through her, still presses back against the wall, his hands clenched white knuckled in the blanket and still shaking.

“I don’t-” he tries, the words coming out slow, wrong, as if he’s rolling them in his mouth. “I-”

He doesn’t let her come closer until she talks him down. She talks nonsense, and simple things: where they are, who they are, the things she knows to be true.

“Don’t call,” he manages, when he can, his gaze steady even though his voice isn’t. “Not yet.” 

She nods, and isn’t sure why she agrees. “Okay."

\--

By five he’s slipping out of consciousness, slumped like a deadweight against her side, and she's rifling through his pockets for his phone.

She has to hold him – all 200 pounds of him - up to find it. It’s in an inside pocket, and when she pulls it out there’s a piece of paper stuck to it, too, with three names on it. She puts that back, feeling something burn up the back of her neck, like grief, like shame. She keeps going through the phone, though. The contact that Frank mentioned is just below her tip line. “C”.

It picks up after only two rings and she’s so relieved she almost drops the phone.

“Frank,” comes a low voice, dry with sleep and yet still clear. “Frank, what’s-”

“He needs help.” She has difficulty forming the words – keeping them steady, clear, but she tries. “I’m a friend –. he’s got an infection, it’s bad, and he’s- having a seizure, I think.” She bites her a lip, her grip white-knuckled on the phone and her free hand in Frank’s hair. “I don’t know what to do.”

“Put him on his side,” comes the voice down the phone, calm, precise. “Don’t restrain him, just wait for it to pass. Let me know when it’s over. Okay? Where are you? I can come but I gonna need an address – are you at the flat, or-”

“Brooklyn,” Karen answers, as Frank trembles against her knees. She presses her lips together but doesn’t stop looking, soothing her fingers through his too-short hair. “The flat. He didn’t-” she takes another breath, and Frank starts to settle, his chest jerking with heavy breaths, his head turned away from her. “I think it’s over now.”

“Okay,” she hears dimly from the phone still at her ear – it’s hard to hear, over her pulse drumming in her throat and her heart beating through her ribs. “Okay. I’ll be there in thirty.”

He doesn’t say anything else, no platitudes, and he doesn’t ask for the full address. Karen catalogues that, dimly – the clear-cut answer speaks military, and 'C', he knows where to go – he’s been here before.

She sits there and Frank breathes, and eventually the room shudders back into silence.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Rewritten, revamped (heh heh) - please give bundles of love to ejunkiet for convincing me to give this fic another shot. Let's see where we go, this time.
> 
> Had another idea, tweaked again, and now this is ten times more devastating. :')


	2. Chapter 2

Curtis. Curtis Hoyle. The name slots into place as she opens the door, as she steps back to let him in and he walks through, bringing a stir of the city with him, stagnant in the heat. She knows him as much as she can, from the glimpses Frank gives her when he mentions him. Steady hands and a library of second-hand books.

“Hey,” he says, letting the duffel drop from his shoulder. He maps the inside of the apartment, free hand lingering at his hip, and it doesn’t surprise her, no more than the familiarity with which he turns to her. He nods towards the bedroom. “He in there?”

He’s moving before she can respond, nudging open the door- “God _dammit_ , Frank,” - and then he’s by the bed, bag open on the mattress.

“Goddammit,” she hears him say again, hands moving from Frank’s forehead to his neck. Frank mumbles in response, something quiet, slurred, and her eyes burn as Curtis lets out something like a laugh, levering himself down onto the bed beside him. “Yeah, yeah, buddy,” she hears him say. “You know you know you're not making any sense right now.”

He starts reeling out his equipment- pressure cuff, stethoscope, antiseptic bottles and she lurches herself forward from the doorway, handing over a fresh glass of water.

“Fill me in,” he says, accepting the glass but pushing it to the side. He doesn’t look up. She talks and he moves from item to item in his kit, removing the bandage from the bite, examining it, pressing his fingers under Frank’s chin again. “Do you know which ones he took?” he asks, when she mentions the antibiotics and she brings him the collection she found under the sink. He looks them over and snorts. “Figures.”

She’s sitting in the other room on the floor with her back to the wall when Curtis comes back in, washing his hands in the cracked sink. “So,” he begins conversationally, his back to her. The set of his shoulders is unreadable. “Are you going to tell me why he isn’t in a hospital?”

Karen tips her head back and blows out a breath, and it comes out more like a laugh.

“Have you ever been able to convince Frank to do something he doesn’t want to do?”

He turns and there might be a smile there but then again, there might not. He levels her with a steady look until she shrugs, her shoulders as heavy as her head. She feels like she’s been awake for days.

“How is he?” she tries, and Curtis’s expression changes into something that says _how do you think?_ He tosses the towel back at the sink.

“He needs to go to a hospital.”

She tightens her jaw, twisting her fingers in her lap.

“Yeah, he does.”

Curtis looks at her for another long moment, his mouth firm, and then he relents, recrossing those few steps between the bedroom and the door.

He doesn’t sit next to her, but he does pull up the stool, drawing it to the table and taking a second to adjust his prosthetic after he sits. He’s wearing trainers and sweat pants, she notices now: practical, controllable clothing. A red sock peeks from one of his trouser legs.  She wonders how quickly he’d been able to roll out of bed and whether he’s kept a medkit stocked, just in case.

“Karen, right?” he says. “The reporter, at the bulletin.”

She smiles. “Are you a fan?”

He chuckles and she likes the sound, she decides. “Not quite.” His gaze slides over to her and then away again, and he lowers his hands to the table, smoothing them over the wood. When he nears the edge he balls one of them until he can press the knuckles down. “He mentions you.”

She nods, and then swallows, a lump burning in her throat. “Yeah. Yeah, he mentions you too.”

He snorts, rubbing an exhausted hand across his forehead. “Yeah, I’m sure he does.”

“Do you know what’s wrong?”

Curtis looks at her again, then sighs. “No,” he says. “I don’t. It’s a fever, but the symptoms, the speed of it - it’s nothing I know. Then again, I stitched people back together. My _expertise_ is limited.”

She nods. “And the seizure?”

He clasps his hands together on the table and tells her it straight: “that’s got more to do with that bullet to the head he took a year ago.”

She nods, slowly, and takes a deep breath, piecing that together: that maybe this isn’t the first time. He's had these episodes before, that makes sense- and her chest _hurts_ because she hadn’t known about it; she hadn’t known to ask.

It takes her a little while to find her voice again. "What next?"

"He needs to go to the hospital." He gives her another of those steady looks. "I don't know what the two of you have going on, right now, but if it's something you shouldn't be publicly linked to-"

She shakes her head firmly. "Not going anywhere."

He raises a hand in supplication. "Alright. Then there's not much more we can do tonight. Let him sleep. I'll take him in the morning. Or  _we_ can," he adds, at her pointed look. He smiles tiredly, and she manages one back.

The silence sits, and she stares through the open door to Frank's room.

“Did you think about going into medicine?” she asks, eventually. “After you came back?”

The stool creaks as Curtis shifts and then shrugs. “Yes, and no. It's not easy, even if you’ve got a plan - doesn’t matter how many years you’ve done, corpsman doesn’t translate into much. I lost my plan to an IED.” He shrugs again and smiles, in that way that puts people at ease, and she thinks she sees why Frank likes him. She thinks she likes him. “That’s how it goes. You get through it.

"Sometimes I think, I'm glad I didn't do it. Maybe I've seen enough blood and death for a lifetime.”

Her gaze wanders back to the open door and the lump of Frank in the blankets beyond.

“Yeah,” she says, quietly.

“Yeah,” he echoes, and moves his hands together, fingers curling against the wood.

After another minute, Curtis sways into motion once more and nudges his shoulder towards her. “What he needs right now - is sleep. And I think you need some too, right?”

When she says nothing he huffs a laugh. “You’re as stubborn as he is. Fine. We’ll take him to the hospital first thing - it’s been long enough that a couple of hours shouldn’t make much difference, and sleep will do him good. It’d do you good, too.”

“I’ll be fine,” she says, not moving from the floor.

He scrubs his face and then his hair, and then pushes himself to his feet, turning back to the bedroom.

“Suit yourself. I’ll keep an eye on him.”

She nods, and so he goes, taking the stool and a book he snags from a shelf with him. He leaves the door open and she sees him prop himself back against the wall, book in hand. _Brave, New World._

She regathers her case notes and spreads them on the small table, as if they still mattered; going over the notes scrawled in her handwriting and his.

 

\--

 

Half an hour later and she's frozen in the doorway as Curtis holds Frank's head in his hands, searching fingers pressed under his chin.

“Don’t you do this to me, Frank,” he swears as he pushes Frank flat, forcing the words between chest compressions. All she can see of Frank is an arm pulled free of the sheet, stretched towards her, fingers curled in and shaking with each impact. 

Curtis pauses long enough to force air into Frank's lungs, long and deep, and tries for a pulse again.

“Come on, come _on_ , Frank, you don’t get to do this-”

There's a ringing in her ears, filling the hot apartment. Her fingers are thick and slow as she forces her phone out of her pocket, as she fumbles with the keypad, and then she's pressing it to her ear; there's someone at the other end of it.

Repeat, repeat, repeat - Curtis tries and tries again, braced over the bed like he's pouring himself into it.

  
\--

  
Frank Castle is dead for 4 minutes and thirty seconds.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The length of chapter 1 was a fluke, I'm sorry - most of these updates will be shorter, but also more frequent? :)
> 
> I love Curt


End file.
